Recipe: Cobi’s Ultimate Backcountry Strawberry Pancakes

These pancakes are so good! In fact, I think they are the best! I have taken my family’s cherished pancake recipe, the recipe that comes from an old hardcover cookbook and has food stains all over it, and made a few changes so that I could bring it into the backcountry with me.

When I’m out for more than 2 or 3 days I want to go as light as possible with food. So I mainly eat oatmeal every morning, but every few days I will have pancakes just to switch it up a bit. It makes a huge difference because it’s those little things when you’re out for 12 days that make all the pain feel like more gain.

As soon as strawberries are ready for the pickin’, I’m out in the field. I have discovered a love for pick-your-own because I wait so long to have strawberries (almost a year), so when they’re super fresh; picked right out of the patch, I want to take that awesomeness with me into the backcountry.

I love being in a strawberry patch!

I wash ’em up real good and then slice. I dehydrate these all for my camping trips. They turn into yummy strawberry chips that I can add to my oatmeal and pancakes.

Dehydrating takes the moisture out, leaving a concentrated-flavour of strawberries. So frickin’ good.

My family’s pancake recipe makes the fluffiest pancakes. To get the same “fluff” I’ve kept a lot of the recipe the same, but changed a few things like substituting eggs for flax eggs (I no longer have to worry about the life of an egg in hot summer weather), ground flax acts like a binding agent like eggs, and adding powdered milk instead of liquid milk.

And because I have a ridiculous list of food allergies, I make them vegan and wheat-free. Wait! Don’t go anywhere! You don’t have to make these vegan, wheat-free, I promise! I will post the recipe with variations.

Cobi’s Ultimate Backcountry Strawberry Pancakes

Makes 5 large pancakes or 8 small

Ingredients

1 cup spelt flour (or whatever type of flour you prefer)

1 tsp sea salt

1 tsp baking soda

1 flax egg (2.5 tbsp ground flax)

1/8 cup soy milk power, or buttermilk powder

1 cup water

2 tbsp butter (we use coconut spread because the flavour is amazing)

Butter for frying (but can use oil, or we like to use coconut spread again because it has an amazing flavour and really crisps up the edges, and we don’t have to worry about it spoiling in hot summer weather)

Directions

Add all dry ingredients in a ziplock bag and pack it away with your camping food. Pack dried strawberries in a separate ziplock bag.

Take all of this and put it into a ziplock bag.

At Camp

Empty your dry ingredients into your camp bowl or container. You can add 1 cup of water, but I just eyeball it. Add enough so you just wet the dry ingredients, making the batter really thick.

You can add your strawberry chips that are dried, or if you want to take the time to rehydrate them in another little bowl or cup with some boiling water, you can do that too before adding to the batter.

Add 2 tbsps of the butter of your choice (you gotta try coconut butter!) to your frying pan to melt. Once it’s melted, add it to your batter and mix just until combined.

Add your rehydrated or dried strawberry chips to the batter.Mix just enough so that the dry ingredients get wet. There should be a few lumps. This helps with the “fluffy” part.

4. Add more butter to your frying pan and start frying.

Normally I’d cook these on our camp stove, but for the purposes of this blog, I’m using an old electric frying pan we have that is used specifically for pancakes in my house.Super fluffy, delicious strawberry pancakes!

Normally one batch of these gives my husband and I enough for breakfast and a pancake or two to wrap up and take with us to snack on later on the portage or in the canoe.

Absolute nonsense in the backcountry.

And if you have fresh wild blueberries around camp, toss those in too!

I hope you get a chance to try this recipe at home or at camp. Let me know how it goes! They’d be perfect to try when you’re out winter camping.

Here are the pancakes being fried up at camp in the Quetico/Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Thanks for the comment, Rosemary! You’ll love this recipe! As I mentioned in the blog post, the edges get nice and crispy if you use a coconut spread to fry them in (plus the flavour is awesome). Let me know how they turn out!